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What's the Difference Between Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS?

Compare Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS side by side — features, pricing, and ideal use cases to help you choose the right product.

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Comparisons
Amazon ECS
Amazon EKS
Category

Containers, Orchestration

Containers, Kubernetes

Description

Fully managed AWS native container orchestration service

Managed Kubernetes service for running containerized applications

Best for
  • Microservices
  • Batch jobs
  • Application migration
  • Hybrid deployments
  • Kubernetes workloads
  • Hybrid deployments
  • Machine learning
  • Batch processing
Key features
  • AWS Fargate integration
  • Service auto scaling
  • Service mesh
  • Capacity providers
  • Spot instances
  • Managed control plane
  • EKS Anywhere
  • Fargate support
  • Add-ons marketplace
  • Auto mode
Pricing model

No additional charge for EC2 launch type; Fargate pricing for Fargate launch type

$0.10/hr per cluster + underlying compute

Free tier

No

No

Expert take

“ECS is the fastest path to running containers on AWS. Deep integration with IAM, CloudWatch, and VPC means less glue code, and flexible compute options (EC2, Fargate, or ECS Managed Instances) let you match infrastructure to your workload without managing orchestration overhead.”
— Aditya Ramakrishnan, AWS Product Marketing Manager

“EKS is production-grade Kubernetes without the undifferentiated heavy lifting of operating it. From Auto Mode handling compute lifecycle to EKS Capabilities providing managed Argo CD and resource orchestration, teams get the full Kubernetes ecosystem with the reliability and scale of AWS underneath”
— Aditya Ramakrishnan, AWS Product Marketing Manager

Product page

When to use Amazon ECS or Amazon EKS

Use Amazon ECS when:

  • Microservices
  • Batch jobs
  • Application migration
  • Hybrid deployments

Learn more about Amazon ECS »

Use Amazon EKS when:

  • Kubernetes workloads
  • Hybrid deployments
  • Machine learning
  • Batch processing

Learn more about Amazon EKS »

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